The Lego Rules: How Childhood Building Blocks Shaped My Approach to Business Design

Some kids carried stuffed animals to family gatherings. I carried Lego creations—carefully engineered, proudly transported, and absolutely not to be mixed with bricks of the wrong color. For years, those little plastic blocks were my world, my creative outlet, and, as it turns out, an early blueprint for how I think today.

Lego was more than a toy for me—it was a universe. I spent hours building elaborate structures, vehicles, boats, and architectural experiments that probably violated most principles of physics but delighted my imagination. I didn’t just build something once and move on. I would return to each creation over and over, improving it, expanding it, streamlining it, making it sturdier, cooler, or more functional.

But there was a quirk: I refused to mix colors.

Red belonged with red. Blue with blue. Yellow with yellow. Multicolor builds were unthinkable—not because they couldn’t work, but because they didn’t feel right. My creativity focused on shape, functionality, and structure, while color became a strange constraint I couldn’t explain at the time.

When my family gathered, I didn’t bring board games or action figures. I showed up with my latest build, determined to demonstrate its moving parts—landing gear, swiveling cannons, extendable ramps—whatever engineering marvels I had squeezed out of my limited collection. Lego wasn’t just play; it was identity.

I didn’t realize it then, but my Lego universe was teaching me how to build systems, iterate on ideas, and present my creations to an audience—skills that would later fuel my career.

What looks like innocent childhood play turns out to be the foundation for how I approach leadership, innovation, and organizational design. Those bricks carried their own set of rules and insights that still shape my thinking today.

1. Great systems evolve—they aren’t built once.

My Lego projects were never finished. They were prototypes in perpetual motion. In business, the same instinct applies: processes, teams, products, and strategies all require iteration. A leader’s job is not to declare victory at the first functional version, but to revisit, refine, and improve continually.

Static systems collapse. Evolving ones thrive.

2. Constraints can fuel creativity—but they can also limit it.

My refusal to mix colors was an early lesson in how constraints cut both ways. On one hand, they forced discipline and clarity. On the other, they restricted imaginative and growth potential.

In leadership, constraints can encourage elegant solutions. But when they become rigid rules—“We don’t sell to that segment,” “We only hire this type of person,” “We always do it this way”—they stifle growth.

The key is knowing which constraints are useful and which are self-imposed cages.

3. Presentation matters.

Bringing Lego creations to family gatherings wasn’t just about showing what I’d built—it was storytelling. I explained the features, demonstrated the functions, and handled objections (“Yes, the ramp is supposed to move like that”). Without knowing it, I was practicing the fundamentals of sales, pitching, and executive communication.

If you can explain a Lego sailboat to an audience of relatives, you can explain a go-to-market strategy to a room of CEOs.

4. Building with reusable pieces creates long-term flexibility.

Lego teaches modular thinking. You build something great, then eventually take it apart and use the same pieces to build something different—better, stronger, smarter. That’s a remarkably accurate metaphor for company-building.

Teams, roles, and processes should be designed with modularity in mind: easy to adapt, easy to reconfigure, resistant to brittleness.

Modular organizations scale; rigid ones crack.

5. Creativity thrives at the intersection of structure and freedom.

Lego is systematic—brick sizes, connections, geometry. But it’s also boundless. That tension shaped how I lead today. I believe in frameworks, structure, and clarity—but within those guardrails, I encourage autonomy and experimentation.

Great companies don’t choose between structure and creativity. They combine them.

Lego wasn’t just a childhood obsession. It was leadership training in disguise. Those multi-hour sessions of building, breaking, rebuilding, and explaining taught me to love the iterative process, respect the power of structure, and—yes—recognize when my own rules limit creativity.

If childhood me insisted on perfect color coordination, adult me has learned to embrace a few mismatched bricks now and then. After all, some of the best business ideas start with a willingness to mix things up.